I present a novel (pilot) approach to mapping regional dialects in American English using data collected by the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. The dataset analyzed consists of acceptability judgment surveys administered online. I use interpolation and tessellation in ArcGIS to project a uniform geographic set of data points, and then the Gabmap clustering tool to identify broader dialect regions. The results correspond closely to traditional dialect boundaries, which is striking, given that (a) the way data was collected, (b) the kind of data collected, (c) the way it was analyzed, and (d) the time period it came from are all very different from the projects that led to previous regions. I then show how Gabmap can be used to explore how regions exhibit varying degrees of distinctiveness, and I emphasize that regions can be characterized not only by the syntactic features they possess, but also by those that they lack.

In this paper, we draw on corpus data to show that in Icelandic, verbs that assign distinct cases can be coordinated and share a single object: the verb on the right determines the case that the object bears. However, it turns out that fine-grained details of how case is realized on the object morphologically have an effect on which verb is more likely to come first: the one that assigns accusative or the one that assigns dative. If the object is syncretic for accusative and dative, then there is no preference, and both word orders are equally frequent. If the object is not syncretic, then there is a preference to put the dative-assigning verb last. But this preference is not equal for all objects: when the accusative is realized by a zero affix, the preference is weaker than when the accusative is realized by a non-zero affix. We present an analysis of these facts that is grounded in formal spellout mechanisms and the following two guiding principles: choose the order that expresses the most case features, and choose the order that uses the fewest mechanisms. Non-syncretic objects vary in the strength of the preference in a way that can be connected to these two principles, as long as we make certain specific assumptions about how spellout works, most importantly that zero affixes result from the absence of Vocabulary Insertion, rather than the insertion of a phonologically empty symbol, and Impoverishment exists as a spellout mechanism, one that is distinct from Vocabulary Insertion.

This paper uses survey results to analyze patterns of judgments across different versions of the non-standard verbal use of the word rather, which can take participial morphology, as in rathered. Across numerous possible instantiations of the construction, there appear to be in fact a quite limited number of grammars, which are generated by an implicational hierarchy of functional heads, along with the availability of a silent verb have. The overall picture supports several broader conclusions. First, bare-infinitive-selecting verbs are nearly "closed class" because they have special syntactic properties that go beyond semantic or even syntactic selection: they must value the temporal verbal features of the embedded verb, or else provide a structural context for such valuation. Second, silent verbs can be licensed by head-moving to a modal head in the extended projection. This movement is freely available, but silence demands recoverability, which limits its application only to certain verbs, and certain uses/meanings of those verbs. Third, in addition to previously known configurations for building parasitic participle constructions, movement of a lower verb to a higher verb can extend the phase of the lower verb and lead to its silence. Fourth, the distribution of rather suggests that volitional meaning is not a primitive, but is constructed from smaller primitives. Finally, microvariation reveals a tight connection among logically distinct functional heads, suggesting that they are not acquired independently of each other, but interact in significant ways.

AbstractThe work aims to bring a basic, but detailed description of Icelandic nominalizations to bear on the general theoretical and architectural issues that nominalizations have raised since the earliest work in generative syntax. While nominalization has long been central to theories of argument structure, and Icelandic has been an important language for the study of argument structure and syntax, Icelandic has not been brought into the general body of theoretical work on nominalization. This book shows that Icelandic-specific issues in the analysis of Derived Nominals have broad implications that go beyond the study of that one language. In particular, Icelandic provides special evidence that Complex Event Nominals (CENs), which seem to inherit their argument structure from the underlying verbs, can be formed without nominalizing a full verb phrase. This conclusion is at odds with prominent theories of nominalization which claim that CENs have the properties that they have precisely because they involve the nominalization of full verb phrases. The proposal in this book develops a theory of allosemy within the framework of Distributed Morphology, showing how one single syntactic structure can get distinct semantic interpretations corresponding to the range of readings that are available to Derived Nominals. The resulting proposal demonstrates how the study of Icelandic nominalizations can both further our understanding of argument structure and shed new light on the syntax-semantics interface.

Abstract: In this article, we analyze the syntax of sentences such as Here is my daughter , which we refer to as presentatives. Presentatives turn out to have a wide range of properties that distinguish them sharply from ordinary declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, and exclamatives. Drawing on recent work on the left periphery, we develop a novel account of their syntactic structure that uses only independently proposed syntactic primitives. We argue that English presentatives involve an ordinary DP combined with two left-peripheral heads, encoding the time and location of the speaker, along with an anaphoric T head and a light verb. The resulting structure is a triple consisting of the speech time, speech location, and an entity denoted by a DP. The overall picture that emerges suggests that presentatives may constitute their own minor clause type, one that we might expect to be widely available crosslinguistically, since it is built from a particular combination of these widely available primitives. A brief survey of presentatives in languages other than English suggests that they are indeed widely available, and our analysis provides an explicit framework for detailed investigations of presentatives in other languages, which may use an overlapping, but not necessarily fully identical, set of primitives.

Abstract This chapter discusses readings beyond the Complex Event Nominal (CEN) reading. The claim is that these divide into two groups. In the first group, v is semantically expletive, and n is semantically contentful, so n combines semantically with the root. In this case, the alloseme inserted in n can interact directly with the meaning of the root in an unpredictable, idiosyncratic way that may need to be listed. In the second group, v is semantically contentful, like it is in CENs, but unlike in CENs, n is semantically contentful too. In this case, the alloseme inserted in n cannot interact directly with the root, so the result is a compositional, non-idiosyncratic meaning. This distinction is illustrated and supported with case studies of verbal prefixes and a class of verbs argued to have the structure of compounds. This chapter also discusses the distinction between allosemy and ’semantic readjustment’ of a root.

AbstractThis chapter presents a general study of Icelandic nominalizations, which have received little attention in theoretically driven work. It characterizes Icelandic nominalizations within the broad theoretical literature and shows how Icelandic nominalizations are similar to English Derived Nominals (and not English gerunds), of the type marked by -ation, -ment, -ance, and the like. It describes the morphology of Icelandic nominalizations and addresses issues having to do with stem changes, zero morphology, and fusional morphemes. It provides critical scrutiny of diagnostics that identify Complex Event Nominals (CENs) but defends the claim that the CEN reading is a distinct reading. It argues that Icelandic nominalizations contain a v-head but may not contain Voice. It concludes that the similarities between English and Icelandic Derived Nominals are strong enough that conclusions about Icelandic should bear on English and vice-versa. This conclusion sets the stage for the Icelandic-specific issues raised in Chapter 3.

Research Article| December 01 2023 11. Variation in Morphosyntax Jim Wood; Jim Wood jim wood is associate professor of linguistics at Yale University and associate editor of the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics. His primary research interests lie in syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics. Since 2012, he has been a leading member of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, which studies dialect variation in North American English morphosyntax. Email: jim.wood@yale.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Raffaella Zanuttini Raffaella Zanuttini raffaella zanuttini is professor of linguistics at Yale University. She studies both languages that are vastly different from one another (like English, Italian, and Korean) and varieties that are minimally different (like the so called dialects of Italy and the United States), with the goal of understanding the limits of grammatical variation. In 2011 she cofounded the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, a research group whose goal is to document and analyze microsyntactic variation in North American English. Email: raffaella.zanuttini@yale.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Publication of the American Dialect Society (2023) 108 (1): 206–227. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-11036932 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jim Wood, Raffaella Zanuttini; 11. Variation in Morphosyntax. Publication of the American Dialect Society 1 December 2023; 108 (1): 206–227. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-11036932 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Dialect SocietyThe Publication of the American Dialect Society Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 American Dialect Society2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

We discuss remarkable constructions in Icelandic that have the distributive pronoun hvor ‘each’ in common: the reciprocal construction hvor annar ‘each other’, and the distributive construction hvor sinn ‘each their’, which also comes in a sinn hvor ‘their each’ version. We provide the first detailed description of these constructions, in particular their case and word order properties, which raise recalcitrant puzzles, and then we discuss what they say about the syntax of nonfinite verbs. Specifically, the word order and case properties of these constructions indicate that nonfinite verbs in Icelandic undergo short verb movement within the verb phrase. That is, the evidence indicates that the leftmost element in these constructions, alternatively hvor or sinn, originates inside an object DP and moves, by what we call e-raising, to the base position of an antecedent with which it agrees, before being stranded by that very antecedent. Nevertheless, the verb appears to the left of this element, even when it is a nonfinite verb, showing that it must undergo short movement to the left of Spec,vP. In addition, the interaction of e-raising and case has important consequences for Case theory, as it indicates that case agreement and case marking take place in PF.

We show that LCs (i) may involve an embedded passive VoiceP, despite being morphologically infinitive (cf. Pitteroff 2014), (ii) entail a change of location of the theme, and (iii) exhibit an existence presupposition on the theme. We argue that ILCs and TLCs are distinguished from ordinary causative constructions in that the matrix light verb has a locative meaning that is absent from ordinary causatives. We show furthermore that the three constructions differ in terms of the Voice heads they embed: while OCs may embed active, passive, or unaccusative verb phrases, ILCs only embed a passive VoiceP, and TLCs embed either a passive or active VoiceP. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses and compares the argument structure of LCs and OCs. Section 3 then discusses the special properties that further distinguish LCs from OCs. Section 4 concludes.

The goal of this article is to understand the syntax of Icelandic indirect causatives (ICs), especially with respect to the implicit causee. We show that the complement of the causative verb must be at least as large as a VoiceP, and that it shares some properties with active VoicePs and others with passive VoicePs. We make sense of this state of affairs by proposing that the causee, while phonetically silent, has an explicit syntactic representation, but as a φP rather than a DP. We further propose that ICs are built by stacking a second VoiceP on top of the lexical verb’s first VoiceP, and that this configuration, along with the underspecified interpretation of φP, leads to a special thematic interpretation of both the causer and the implicit causee. Our analysis suggests that there are certain core ingredients involved in building ICs—such as stacked VoicePs and an underspecified causee—but that the source of these ingredients can vary across languages and constructions, depending on the formal primitives that grammars make available to the languages more generally.

Cross-linguistically, reflexive verbs frequently show puzzling behavior when they are embedded under causatives. We focus on two ways that this pattern manifests itself in Icelandic Indirect Causatives, formed with the light verb láta ‘let/make/have’: (i) verbs that normally cannot be embedded are allowed with reflexives, and (ii) a pleonastic use of the causative verb becomes available in imperatives with oblique subjects. We propose that these facts follow from the syntax of long-distance reflexives (which involves a “point-of-view” operator OPPOV), and a Voice-stacking analysis of indirect causatives, where two Voice heads are added on top of a single vP. The claim is that there is a limited set of ways to interpret the Voice-stacking structure, and reflexives provide one particular way to do this that is not otherwise available. Assuming that either Voice head can introduce a thematic interpretation or be expletive, we propose that in principle, there are four ways to interpret the Voice-stacking structure. Our analysis supports the view that the syntax and semantics of causatives is derived from the interaction of more basic primitives and mechanisms, and is not encoded with a dedicated functional head in the grammar. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol27/iss1/31 On the Interaction of Reflexives and Periphrastic Causatives in Icelandic Jim Wood and Einar Freyr Sigurðsson*

This article explores geographical variation in a range of understudied dative constructions in American English. It shows that these constructions are found primarily in the South and that they permit numerous syntactic variations and permutations. However, not all sentences and constructions have an equal status. In particular, the authors find that they lie on a continuum of markedness. More marked variants are judged acceptable by fewer speakers and have a more limited geographic distribution. And yet, even the most marked variants cannot be dismissed: the strong geographic nature of their distribution shows that they are a genuine part of the grammar of many speakers. Overall, this research contributes a more detailed picture of dative constructions in American English and a more nuanced picture of syntactic variation in Southern American English; moreover, the authors offer a novel approach to measuring geographical markedness in syntactic variation.

Wood’s ‘Prepositional prefixing and allosemy in nominalizations’ discusses how Icelandic prepositional prefixing supports three main points. First, Wood shows that prepositions play a dual role in constructing verb meaning—while they may have meaning of their own, they may also condition a special meaning for verbal roots. Second, the patterns of prefixation in Icelandic support the claim that DNs, even in the Complex Event Nominal (CEN) reading, can be built by combining heads together directly, without any phrasal material below the nP level. This is in contrast to what Wood calls the ‘Phrasal Layering’ analysis, where what is nominalized is a full verb phrase, perhaps with a VoiceP or other extended vP layers. Third, Wood shows that adjunction and complementation define distinct domains for the conditioning of idiosyncratic meaning, and both are available for the syntactic assembly of words and phrases.<141>

This article explores geographical variation in a range of understudied dative constructions in American English. It shows that these constructions are found primarily in the South and that they permit numerous syntactic variations and permutations. However, not all sentences and constructions have an equal status. In particular, the authors find that they lie on a continuum of markedness. More marked variants are judged acceptable by fewer speakers and have a more limited geographic distribution. And yet, even the most marked variants cannot be dismissed: the strong geographic nature of their distribution shows that they are a genuine part of the grammar of many speakers. Overall, this research contributes a more detailed picture of dative constructions in American English and a more nuanced picture of syntactic variation in Southern American English; moreover, the authors offer a novel approach to measuring geographical markedness in syntactic variation.

This article discusses and analyzes an unusual construction in Icelandic, with a plural pronoun in the singular reading and a directly juxtaposed or annexed NP (or DP), where, for example, 'við Ólafur' (literally “we.NOM Olaf.NOM”) means ‘Olaf and I’. We refer to this construction as Pro[NP]. Pro[NP] constructions have been reported for a handful of languages that lack a case system. Icelandic, in contrast, is a case language, and Pro[NP] in this language is 'case congruent': the pronoun and its NP/DP annex are always in the same case. No such language has to our knowledge ever been described in detail before; we provide the first in-depth investigation of case-congruent Pro[NP]. The article further compares the Icelandic construction to apparently similar constructions, including English 'we linguists' and the Russian type of Pro[x-NP], as in 'my s Petej' (literally “we.NOM with Peter.INSTR”), meaning ‘Peter and I’, showing that the Icelandic construction differs from these, despite having similar (but not identical) semantic properties. We propose that plural personal pronouns consist of two parts: a set of variables, {X, Y}, that determine the form of the pronoun, and an NP annex, which constrains the interpretation of the Y variable. Typically, the annex is phonetically silent (bare plural pronouns), but the Icelandic construction is unusual in that the annex is partly overt, thereby allowing a rare insight into the construction of plural personal pronouns.

In this article, we take a detailed look at clausal ellipsis in Icelandic, a hitherto understudied phenomenon. We focus on case-matching and case-mismatching facts in fragment responses. We argue that although case matching is the norm, constrained instances of case mismatching strongly suggest that there must be silent structure in the ellipsis site, and some syntactic identity condition. We outline these patterns in detail, and provide an analysis that assumes a post-syntactic approach to case marking, and a hybrid identity condition along the lines of Chung (2013).

AbstractThe acceptability of many syntactic constructions varies across speakers. In some, but not all cases, such interspeaker variation is due to speakers coming from different dialect regions. However, since neither dialect regions nor acceptability judgments are discrete, it is not always straightforward to determine when variation in a construction’s acceptability is geographically constrained. In this paper, I present one method of making this determination using the Gi* statistic. I apply it to a variety of syntactic constructions, including presentative datives,so don’t I,be done my homework, intensifiers likewickedandhella, anddo-support withhave yet tosentences. Each shows a different geolinguistic profile, revealing different kinds of issues that quantitative analysis can shed light on. The results show fine-grained geolinguistic differences in syntactic acceptability judgments, demonstrating that the Gi* statistic can be fruitfully applied to further our understanding of geographically-based variation in acceptability judgments.

AbstractThis squib discusses the clitic DU (-du/-ðu/-tu) in Icelandic and compares it with other reduced forms of personal pronouns, such as’ann(forhann‘he’) and’ún(forhún‘she’). We show that there are various restrictions found on DU which are not found on other reduced forms of personal pronouns in Icelandic. We argue that whereas reduced forms such as’annand ’únare morphophonologically conditioned, DU is syntactically conditioned; it is not only clause-bounded but also phase-bounded.